“——­Day, natheless, will glow
    Down in the regions far below,”

doubtless refer to DANA the less, who, when his sheet is utterly overwhelmed in its self-made oblivion, will deserve, and probably obtain, all the brightness and warmth to which the verse refers.

Placing this astounding prediction by the side of the amazing events of the present year, it is impossible for Mr. PUNCHINELLO to repress his feelings of wonder and awe!

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[Illustration]

THE PLAYS AND SHOWS.

There is an old conundrum song that begins—­“Why do summer roses fade?” The late ARTEMUS WARD thought they did it as a matter of business.  Why do the “Two Roses” bloom?  That is WALLACK’S business.  Also just now it happens to be mine.

The modern English comedy is divided into two kinds.  Everybody will consider this statement a conundrum, and answer,—­“Bad and good.”  Wrong, my little dears.  All your lexicographers agree that “kind” means a “race,” which is absurd, because a horse-race, for instance, is anything but kind.  But they explain by saying that it means a genus.  Good plays are not a genus.  They are freaks of nature, like the woolly horse and the sacred cow; only, when they are produced, so many people will not pay money to see them as to see the w.h. and the s.c.

The division of modern plays, as JONATHAN EDWARDS said wittily, in his sparkling treatise on “The Will,” is into the tame and the wild.  For the latter the recipe is simple.  Take some black false beads, hatchets, pistols, a “dog”—­not a quadruped, but the article which was left in Mr. NATHAN’S hall—­a woman in black hair and a white garment, suggestive of repose, strolling at midnight by the banks of the prattling East River, foot of Grand Street, and set a house afire at the end of the third act.  That is the BOUCICAULT style, and as the flippant EDWARDS goes on to observe, it draws like a factory chimney in the Bowery and at NIBLO’s.

But this sort of thing will not do at all at WALLACK’S.  Of course not.  STODDART is permitted to swear there, to be sure; but I understand that he does it for fear people should call WALLACK’S the hall of the Old Men’s Christian Association.  With that exception there is, as somebody said about something, absolutely nothing to offend the most fastidious.  Any person who exhibits excitement upon the stage is discharged at the end of the week with a pension.  Miss MOORE is permitted to weep, but she does it so quietly and nicely that it does not disturb anybody.  And the ushers have received strict orders to eject anybody in the audience who manifests any marked interest in the performance.  A friend of mine from Peoria once went to WALLACK’S, and took no pains whatever to conceal his admiration of the acting.  On the contrary, at a particularly nice point, he actually clapped his hands together twice.  Of course he was arrested for breach of the peace, and locked up